Product Description

What evil lurks beyond the well-trimmed hedges of Midsomer...

The cozy villages of Midsomer County reveal their most sinister secrets in these contemporary British television mysteries. Inspired by the novels of Caroline Graham, modern master of the English village mystery, the series stars John Nettles (Bergerac) as the unflappable Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby with John Hopkins (Love in a Cold Climate) as his brash young assistant. Guest stars include John Burgess, William Gaunt, Freddie Jones, Keith Barron, and Margery Mason.

The Mysteries
The Maid in Splendour—Midsomer Worthy’s beloved local pub figures in a case involving unrequited love, secret business deals, and passionate affairs.
The Straw Woman—Scott becomes bewitched by a village schoolteacher as he and Barnaby unravel a centuries-old mystery in Midsomer Parva.
Ghosts of Christmas Past—Barnaby escapes Christmas with his in-laws only to be thrust into the shadowy world and dark secrets of the mysterious Villiers family.

DVD SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE John Nettles interview, Midsomer map, Caroline Graham biography, and cast filmographies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7546 in DVD
• Brand: ACORN MEDIA
• Released on: 2007-03-27
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Dimensions: .55 pounds
• Running time: 300 minutes

Amazon.com
Idyllic Midsomer county has an alarmingly high mortality rate--at least on television. As actor John Nettles comments in a charming interview, after several series of the murder mystery program Midsomer Murders only a handful of villagers would be left alive. The show's writers tried to lower the body count to a more plausible number, but viewers complained, so Midsomer is as lethal as ever. Set Eight, featuring three episodes from Midsomer Murders' seventh series, racks up its share of corpses as the ever-observant DCI Barnaby (Nettles) and his brash right hand man Dan Scott (John Hopkins) sort through a tale of unrequited love and secret real estate deals that mirrors an old legend, a collision of the church and pagan ways that sparks several flaming deaths, and a Christmas gathering that turns murderous as the truth about a long-ago suicide comes out. Midsomer Murders is topnotch: The 90-100 minute episode length allows each episode to unfold intricate plots while cultivating a distinct atmosphere and establishing vivid characters. Anchoring it all is Nettles, whose combination of gravitas and sly wit make him not only an excellent detective but a delightful and engaging personality. Hopkins is less charismatic, but he provides a suitable foil for his senior colleague. Aside from the interview with Nettles, the extras are modest: A map of the county, a handful of cast filmographies, and a slender bit of biography about Caroline Graham, the mystery novelist who created DCI Barnaby and his rural miasma of passion, jealousy, and bitter revenge. --Bret Fetzer

DVD Talk, March 6, 2007
Recommended - a welcome respite from the flash and noise of detective shows on tv today.

Movie Web
If great acting, great storytelling, and gripping drama is what you want, Midsomer Murders: Set Eight provides it all.

Customer Reviews

Still satisfying, thanks to John Nettles, but the producers may be trying to make the series appeal to a younger demographic
Midsomer Murders - Set 8 is the last three episodes of the series' seventh season. (The first four episodes are contained in Midsomer Murders - Set 7.) It seems to me that with the seventh season, the producers of Midsomer Murders began to cautiously attempt to appeal to a younger and more contemporary demographic. Nothing wrong with that, but at the same time the cleverness of the writing and the complexity (and to a degree, the integrity) of the mysteries have been weakened a bit. The strength of the series is still the performance of John Nettles as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, who finds plenty of murders to solve in the tidy, cozy towns and villages of Midsomer County. Barnaby remains the constant; he's unflappable, shrewd, fair-minded and experienced. Nettles brings a real feel for Barnaby's integrity, intelligence and dry humor to the role.

The three episodes in the set all come with high production values. The stately homes of the well-off never looked better and the smaller homes of the middle class never looked tidier. The countryside is green and beautiful, except when it's nighttime and killers are on the prowl.

The producers, in their effort to stay contemporary, are most likely well aware that their star is now beginning to age a bit. Nettles was 61 when the seventh season began. He probably has less appeal to the younger set than the young hunk (and good actor) John Hopkins, who was brought in to play Barnaby's new assistant, Sergeant Dan Scott. At the same time, the mysteries all too often carry the dreaded burden of the modern psychological backstory. The writers come up with complicated plots, but at times the characters' backstories or the still unformed skills of some of the young actors or the veering toward daytime television melodrama tend to be unsatisfying.

"The Maid in Splendor" starts out with a nice mixture of family tensions, unrequited love and a nasty wife, but the solution depends on an unlikely scenario in which the acting of some key players doesn't quite do the job and on the improbability of one important relationship. We're talking soap opera melodrama.

In "The Straw Woman," Barnaby finds himself in a completely humorless melodrama that features rigid Christian beliefs, earthly love among High Church priests, a roll-in-the-bed episode featuring Sergeant Scott and, again, acting among two key, young players that has little nuance.

"Ghosts of Christmas Past" is the best of the lot with all sorts of family secrets combined with retribution and murder. But here, the solution depends on something Barnaby is told in a report from another police district that he and we learn only after 90 minutes of the 100-minute episode have gone by. This deux ex machina approach to solving mysteries does not play fair with the audience.

Still, John Nettles and the production values are able to keep up our interest, and it was good to see such skilled actors as Freddie Jones, Mel Martin and Bruce Alexander. Let's hope that Inspector Barnaby can find himself dealing with future murders that have more of the dry humor and cleverness of the earlier episodes. We don't want to wind up with CSI: Midsomer County.

Another winner
Forget that Sgt. Troy is gone, the series is still excellent in the BBC tradition.

A solid addition to a good series
Actually consider this a rating of 3 1/2 stars. Not quite good enough for four, but still better than average.



As usual Midsomer Murders delivers charming bucolic English murder mysteries. The characters are quirky, John Nettles is wonderful and John Hopkins is starting to come into his own as DS Scott.



However there are a few negative. First this is actually the second half of the seventh season, which makes numbering the DVD sets annoying for those of us who are anal retentive. (It still somewhat bothers me that the Travelling Wilburys labelled their two albums, volume I and volume III)



Also this set is shorter than the previous sets having only three episodes. The series finally gets around to the "themed" shows having what can only be lablelled their Halloween and Christmas episodes. The Halloween episode was more than a bit contrived, but the Christmas episode made up for it.



All in all, this series is a predictable and enjoyable bit of English cosy and I do recommend you watch it with a nice pot of Darjeeling tea and some shortbread.